We are pleased to announce that Ted Ralphs has received the 2026 INFORMS Computing Society Distinguished Service Award. Professor Ralphs is a faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at Lehigh University. The INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) is one of the most active societies within the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
The ICS Distinguished Service Award recognizes individuals who have made lasting contributions to the computing society. Intended as a lifetime achievement award, it has been presented at most once every two years since 2009. Professor Ralphs will receive the award at the ICS Business Meeting during the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, November 1–4, 2026.
We will soon hear from the selection committee, but it is easy to anticipate some of the many reasons this honor is so well deserved. Professor Ralphs has served in multiple leadership roles in ICS itself: on the ICS Board from 2010-2011, as Vice Chair from 2012-2013, as Chair from 2014-2015, and five times as a conference stream or cluster chair for ICS conferences. His dedicated and influential service as an area editor for the INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC) from 2018-2024 resulted in the creation of a vibrant and growing archive of artifacts associated with papers published in IJOC on Github. In addition, he was a co-founder and long-time member of the board of the COIN-OR Foundation, which long been a strategic partner of ICS.
Dr. Ralphs’ research focuses primarily on large-scale computation and optimization. His work spans theory, computation, and applications, with the goal of bridging the gap between theory and practice. He is a Fellow of INFORMS and serves as an area editor for Operations Research, as well as a technical editor for Mathematical Programming C. He has developed and maintained variety of software packages, benchmark libraries, and open-source repositories, including influential platforms such as MIPLIB and COIN-OR, making deep and lasting contributions to the operations research and optimization communities.
The awardee says “I am deeply honored to be recognized with this award. From the earliest stages of my career, ICS has been my intellectual home and to have this recognition from my ICS colleagues is truly meaningful.”
